Power consumption of data storage systems has become an issue of concern. In particular, there has emerged a demand for more stringent power constraints. It is a challenge to satisfy such constraints without having an undesirable negative impact on performance characteristics of data storage operations.
The desire to reduce power consumption is becoming especially significant to the enterprise data storage market place. At the same time, within the disc drive data storage industry, some are transitioning to a smaller form factor (e.g., from a 3.5 to a 2.5 inch form factor). In an ideal scenario, smaller drives will perform, despite more stringent power constraints, close to the larger drives in terms of random input/output performance. Due to factors such as design improvements in terms of areal density growth rate, the smaller drives are sometimes expected to operate at maximum performance with no power margin due to design considerations such as an increased number of discs in the stack (e.g., three discs instead of two), increased arm length for load/unload, increased data rate and increased ASIC processor speed. A 9 W power threshold is preferred by many customers in the enterprise data storage industry. However, some customers have a more relaxed power requirement and would prefer drives to use more power and perform at a higher level. Other customers in power sensitive conditions prefer to use less power but still maintain an optimized level of performance.
Embodiments of the present invention provide solutions to these and other problems, and offer other advantages over the prior art.